Families are always adapting to changing economic conditions. The new element over the last two decades is that most of the benefits of vigorous economic restructuring have been passed to corporations as most of the costs have been loaded on families. In this sense, the family is the big loser from economic reform. The impacts on families become what the reformer economists too easily dismiss as the (necessary) externalities of economic restructuring. Once they have been successfully ‘externalised’ in the name of greater economic efficiency and responsiveness to market signals, they are of no further concern to the reformers. In this chapter we shall look at middle Australia's daily experience of dealing with the externalities of economic reform. We want to understand how that experience shows up in the life of middle Australian families. What kind of accommodations are they making to the new demands of a deregulated labour market? In what respects is it received as a source of freedom, of choice, of constraint? How do men and women deal with the pressures of living in families? How do they internalise the externalities that have been thrust upon them?